 Hi, I'm Cory. Today we're going to be talking about more than words, using WordPress for business, productivity, health, and all sorts of interesting things. I come from these days, Socrates, New York, which is a little town four hours south of here, a couple hours north of New York City. I've been a web developer for 20 years, a long time, started in the late 90s, before WordPress if there was such a time. In the early 2000s, after building static websites for many years, I got very interested in building what are called SAS apps, web apps, basically trying to make a website more than a brochure. And this kind of sparked an entrepreneurial streak in me as well. So I've, for the last however many years, have been focused largely on how can I make websites do interesting things. And then along came WordPress. And I've been messing around with WordPress now for about seven years. And a few years ago, got very interested in seeing what I could do with it more than just serving up content. And we'll get into that in a second. A couple of things, I still do contract work for a company called Valet, awesome little agency. And then my passion project is a plug-in called Kanban for WordPress. You'll notice the fancy swag that I'm wearing here, which will be shamelessly plugged twice in my talk, but not more. So you'll have to bear with me. So let's start with a little bit of the history. 2013, so five years ago, our illustrious leader, Matt Mullenweg, mentioned using WordPress as an app platform. So again, essentially using WordPress for building web apps, more than just serving content. He also talked at the time about WordPress becoming the operating system for the web, which is an interesting analogy. Because we're used to nowadays using apps on our phone, on our operating systems, but also on the web, for doing things like tracking data, interacting with each other, being social, whatever it might be. So thinking of WordPress as an operating system is actually a really interesting analogy when you think about serving up applications. So today, basically, to accomplish that, we're on WordPress. We're using plugins. We're interacting with SaaS apps, other services. And basically, this lets us use WordPress as more than just a CMS, which is great. The other thing that I'm seeing is a lot more businesses and even individuals are starting to use WordPress like an operating system, self-hosted apps. So basically, creating a new instance of WordPress installed somewhere, maybe on a subdomain, and then running a single plug-in to let them accomplish something. So we'll talk about that in a little bit too. So goals for the talk today, I wanna just generally talk about creative ways to use WordPress. I'm gonna talk a lot about websites I've built, because again, this has kind of been my trajectory, problems that I've seen and solved, or didn't solve, or tried to solve. Also interesting things that I've heard about that people are using WordPress for, and then also just crazy off the wall things that I've imagined. I'm gonna list essentially the problem that the website or the web app is trying to solve, and how I might solve them, because I have all the answers, I am an expert. No, this isn't true at all. But given 20 years of experience, here's how I might approach it. Please take it all with a grain of salt. Some of it's a little bit of creative thinking, wishful thinking, maybe. The other thing is that this is basically going to just be a random list of random things. My goal here is really to inspire you to think about how you can use WordPress again for as more than as a CMS. And if you've got a specific idea, or hopefully if I set off a light bulb for you, and wanna talk through how we might solve that, if I don't answer the question during the talk, raise your hand afterwards or come find me, and I'll help you brainstorm how we could actually build that. So let's start with the obvious, e-commerce. So years ago, I worked for, I was working for an agency, and wound up building a first draft of an app, web app on WordPress using WooCommerce for a company called Freshly. Anybody familiar with Blue Apron? So Blue Apron is a service that's pretty popular, especially in the U.S., where they ship you a box full of ingredients and then instructions on how to cook dinner. So basically it saves you a trip to the grocery store. Freshly was trying to solve the problem, even a level up, they would completely cook the meal for you and then ship it to you, so all you had to do was microwave it. Some of the challenges with this, however, are sort of the obvious things of how do you solve checkout? How do you solve payment processing? Well, obviously WooCommerce took care of that for us. But you get into some of the bigger challenges like processing recurring payment and then also scheduling. So this is where it got crazy. They had chefs that would cook hundreds of meals between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. so that FedEx could show up at 9 a.m. or whatever it was, and take all of these cooked meals away. So what that meant was WooCommerce had to process all of these orders at midnight so that the payments would go through by 2 a.m. so that the chefs could cook these meals. This is where it got, when a step beyond your sort of normal e-commerce where or even subscription where payments just go through whenever they want, we had to have them go through at midnight. So this was a huge challenge and server issues and all sorts of stuff. For better or worse, Freshly took off like a rocket so suddenly WooCommerce was trying to process 10,000 orders a day all at midnight. So anyway, you can see some of the challenges that we had to face. The other thing was doing interesting reporting, basically spitting out custom reports so that the chefs could cook these meals. But anyway, eventually they wound up growing beyond WordPress but it was a really fun, interesting challenge and one of my first big like, oh right, there's a lot more we can do here. So around that time I had another client that was specifically interested in, the elevator pitch was basically Yelp, if you're familiar with Yelp, it's reviews of restaurants and bars and whatnot, but specifically for reality television. So the client would spend endless hours watching reality TV, take careful notes of every restaurant and bar that the people on the reality television show would go to and then put them all into a website where you could then go because apparently people like to eat where other people have eaten on camera. Not something I can relate to personally but not judging. So how did we accomplish some of these things? We used a plugin called Theme My Login that took care of the users signing in and interacting, rating venues that they've been to that kind of thing. The other crazy thing was, again, she would watch all of these shows. I can just picture her with like six televisions, like a mad scientist, you know, evil villain. But she found it much easier to review these shows and make these lists and spreadsheets so she would essentially, at the end of every week, having watched all of these shows, we had to import all of these reviews into the website. So we used a plugin called All Import. We also ran into issues with, or another problem to solve was ratings. So there again, there was a plugin that let us basically add where people could add comments, native functionality. Use a plugin where you could choose one to five stars, that kind of thing. The last big interesting challenge, now it's solved. There's a plugin called Geo My WordPress, which is just such a great name. But back then, we didn't have such a solution, so I actually had to write a bunch of custom code that would figure out the latitude and longitude of the location and then map it to the search engine so that people could type in their Latin long or what's within 30 miles of me, that kind of thing. But it was, which was an interesting challenge. But again, one of those things that got me thinking about, okay, so you've got a regular post type in WordPress that is a venue that is the sushi place on the corner. How do you start adding geolocation to that? All right, so that's Yelp. What about, let's say, we wanted to emulate Twitter, just getting creative here. I asked this recently on the post status slack community, if you're familiar. And we actually, a bunch of us had fun brainstorming this because I was like, well, would you use buddy press, sort of the community elements? And everybody was like, no dummy, this is all built into WordPress, right? So basically you'd create a custom post type, call it tweets, right? And right away you've got tagging. Now you'd have to figure out how to, if somebody typed in a tweet, which is essentially a post in this case, and did hashtag WCMTL, right? How would you then map that to a tag? So I think you'd have to write a little custom code, basically this is for the nerds among us, the devs. You would have to use, what is it? Save posts, right? There's a filter, so after a post is saved, a tweet. Basically you could go through it, find all of the hashtags, map those to tags. But then you could benefit from the native functionality, which is built into WordPress slash tag slash WCMTL, and you'd see all the tweets. I think the final challenge there would be assuming that every user, every person who signs up right there, quote, unquote, Twitter account would be a WordPress user account, how would you follow those authors? And in looking for, obviously I started to brainstorm ways to solve this, but there's a guy named Pippin Williamson who actually wrote a great tutorial on this. So another great example of in the WordPress world, pretty much every problem has been solved, and probably a better developer than me has written about how to do it. Just to take this one step further, let's say you wanted to build Snapchat, because I guess that's what all the kids are into these days. There's actually a plugin called post expiration date, which will remove a post on a scheduled date. So that would solve sort of that one differentiating feature between Twitter and Snapchat, because they're identical, right? I don't know, these are a lot of it's lost on me. Like I said, I've been building websites for 20 years. So speaking more broadly about social media in general, how can you use WordPress to manage your social media presence, right? Sort of the obvious problem or the obvious solution. The obvious thing that most people want to do is if it's a blog, if you're writing blog posts, you want to promote your posts. And so there are, again, there are plugins that'll do this, Post Promoter Pro is one of them. Revive, old posts is another. But let's say we wanted to take this a step further. If you've heard of their apps, there's an app called Buffer, there's apps called Edgar. I'm sure there's more of them. But basically, if you wanted to schedule posts, and maybe that has nothing to do with your actual blog posts or whatever, actually, there's some wonderful folks here who wrote a plugin and run a service called Social Websuite. I wrote a little plugin called Schedule Tweets, which is sort of a simpler version, and then WP to Tweet. So this is a great example of if you are a developer, you're probably gonna roll your own, don't roll your own. These are solved problems. There are plugins that'll do it for you because if you've ever tried to integrate with some of these APIs, not only are they often complicated and sort of tangled, but they also seem to change. A lot of the, it was at Facebook, well on Twitter just changed their API, making this kind of, yeah, it's a tough problem. So anyway, I highly encourage, at least for solving these problems, use plugins, let it be somebody else's problem. All right, so getting back to client work, using that as a timeline for some examples. A few years ago, I had to build a website for a company in Florida that had a bunch of cute little bungalows on the beach. So they said, okay, well, maybe VRBO existed at the time, Airbnb, I don't think existed. But anyway, let's say you wanted to solve that problem now, right? You've got a bunch of properties. How do you manage the actual rental of this stuff? Amazingly, there's a plugin called WP Properties, but you could also use, what would you use? Basically, you could use like an EDD, you could use WooCommerce, doing recurring payment. Scheduling would become challenging. So you'd probably want to use a custom post type or some sort of calendar integration. But some interesting challenges or some interesting problems to solve. The other really fun one here was not only did they task us with arranging the property rental, right? But they said, okay, well, so people arrive at the house. We've now also got kayaks and beach chairs and other stuff that we want to let them borrow. So that was fun. There is, again, there's a plugin called WP Inventory Manager, but back then what we wound up doing was creating a custom post type, one for each item, and then adding, using, I think we used, advanced custom fields, basically added fields that said check in, check out, added dates and assigned them to people and then gave the renters access to that. So it kind of went a step deeper. Another project that I did, anybody heard of Tough Mudder? So Tough Mudder is this crazy organization full of crazy people that run these crazy events where basically they create insane obstacle courses that are designed to destroy you. And people pay money to go run these courses that are designed to cause them suffering and pain. And it's really fun. I suppose. So I was working with a team that was tasked with building an internet for these guys. So they were a remote company, some of it based out of Brooklyn, but again, people everywhere. So they wanted to use WordPress as an internet. There are internet plugins, but I honestly encourage you to roll your own. It kind of depends on, because it depends on what you as a company that you're building the website for or whatever needs. So the first thing you need to do is protect that content. So there's basically, there's very simple ways to protect pages. There are plugins that'll do it. Restricted Conscient Pro is one of them. But it's also really easy if you're comfortable enough to go in and edit a template. It's really easy to add just a few lines of code to basically say, if not logged in, then redirect to the home page or whatever. So that's kind of the easy part of this. Then you start looking at, what's next? Oh, employee directory. So there are ways to display users on the front end. You could use native functionality, like there is an author archive page essentially. So they're all of your users if you want to do it that way. You could also use their number of CRM plugins and one of the neater flows that I've seen. Did I really just say neater? That's neat. Cooler, slicker, I don't know. Random words here. But anyway, exporting your address book from Google or something now, I'm obviously often to, we're not really talking about intranets anymore, but let's say you wanted to get your content into a CRM. Basically you can export your address book from Gmail or Yahoo or whatever you're using. Use a plugin like all import and then suck that right into WordPress users. Now you've got all your users there. Talk about project management. Here's the first time I plugged my plugin. That's redundant. Kanban for WordPress, if you're familiar with Kanban as a method. It's a lot of people also know Trello. That is a Kanban board. Basically it's a really good workflow for project management, so of course I'm gonna advocate that. But there are also other project management plugins. If you were looking to build into the internet something like file sharing, Dropbox. If you didn't wanna use Dropbox, you wanted to use WordPress for that. Or asset management, that's another popular way for Tough Mudder. They wanted all of their logos in one place so that they could then send a press to one place to download approved logos, that kind of thing. You could basically use the built-in media manager. But then you need some way, you can use galleries. You could manually put those images on a page. And then there are also obviously plugins, asset manager, WP download manager. And actually WP mayor, which is a website full of tutorials, had a pretty great tutorial on creating an asset management section of your site if you wanted to do that. But let's get crazy, right? So that's the internet for Tough Mudder. What if you actually wanted to run the event? Sure enough, there are plugins for that. But breaking it down into parts, right? The first challenge might be how do you sell tickets? You could use something like WooCommerce, EDD. There's an awesome plugin called Event Espresso. And then you could also integrate with third-party services like Eventbrite is a great one. For selling the ticket, calendar view, that kind of thing. If you're a developer, don't build your own calendar. It's insane, it's messy. Time zones are a nightmare. I strongly encourage you to use a library or a plugin or something like that. But then the actual day of the event, there's an awesome plugin called Events Manager. This is one of the things I love about WordPress. At this point, there's a plugin for everything. It's amazing. So while I was brainstorming this talk, there is a Facebook group called Advanced WP, which is a really cool community of people asking hard questions, sometimes easy questions. But everybody's got an opinion, so everybody weighs in. So I said, how are you guys and gals creatively using WordPress? One of the best answers on there was somebody said, I use it to manage vacations and group trips. I said, okay. So things like a countdown timer, if you've got people that are checking into a website, everybody's going, coming to Montreal for a word camp, adding a countdown timer. So that was solved by a JavaScript library that basically would add it automatically. But there are a lot of really neat little, I said it again, neat. Anyway, there are third party services or websites where they'll let you embed a countdown timer. I thought that was really cool. Flight info, itinerary, obviously that could just be posts. If you add a custom post type, you can add all the content and details you want. But then I realized that a good friend of mine had actually done something like this and taken it a step further where he rode his bike, this guy's nuts, rode his bike across the United States. It took him a long time, obviously. But he, on his website, he had this little tracker so anytime you could sign in or anytime you wanted to, you could look at his website and there was a little him bicycling across the United States pedaling furiously. So I asked him, I said, so how did you do that? Like that's something different. To solve this particular problem, he used a mobile phone app called Bubbler. Hadn't heard of that. Tied that into a third party product called Spotwalla. Hadn't heard of that. Which then had an embeddable widget that he then added to his WordPress homepage. So it's a great example of where basically you can really get creative to check that this actually worked. Sure enough, I Googled it and found that there was a tutorial on how to do this. And this is one of those like, it's not even a plug-in, it's not even a third party to a plug-in, it's a phone app to a third party to a plug-in. So doing a little hacking, but it doesn't necessarily require code, you can get pretty creative. So what about other business cases? Business, we get serious here. If you are a small business, if you have a client that is a small business, here are different ways that small business, or big business, I guess it doesn't have to be small, can get creative, use WordPress, right? The scenario that I'm starting to see more and more is businesses say they're logging into an app to do project management, they're logging into an app to do social media management, they're logging into an app to manage their books, whatever it might be, and getting kind of tired of all these different systems that aren't talking to each other, having to sign into different places, having to, you know, you get a team of eight people, now you're managing all the passwords and everything for all this, so more and more businesses are starting to use WordPress admin as a control center for their business and managing lots of aspects of their business in one place, which I just think is amazing. So talking about business workflow, this actually got added to my talk 20 minutes ago when somebody was like, oh, have you thought of this before? But using something like Gravity Flow was the plugin that he worked on for business workflows and processes, so you've got a form, you collect some data, and then it's more than just, it sends an email, it's like, what if you, you know, people submit an order form or a warranty replacement or something like that, you need to know that somebody looked at it, then somebody shipped it, then they got it, et cetera, et cetera, and so you can apparently map out entire workflows with multiple steps to solve this kind of thing, which is really cool. Here comes plug number two, CRMs, which is customer relationship management, sales tracking, that kind of thing. You can use my plugin, an awesome plugin called Kanban for WordPress. There's also a plugin called WPCRM and there are a couple of other ones, there's one called NoBSCRM, I think. And then again, you can integrate with dedicated apps, like there's an app called Pipedrive that specifically is for tracking sales and sales funnels and how much money that you've won or not won and that kind of thing and obviously you can integrate with something like that. So if you're creating a business website, you wanna manage your reviews, people are leaving your reviews on Yelp, on Google, wherever. There's actually a new service that just came out recently called WP Business Reviews that aggregates all of these reviews into one place and lets you check them out and basically make sure you're doing okay. Customer feedback, so same idea. You can obviously set up forms, there are lots of form builders, ways to collect feedback from your customers. Taking that a step further, there are services that'll let you, in exchange for a tweet or in exchange for a review, let you give away content or give away a coupon, that kind of thing. I'm sorry, I'm losing track of my spot here. Oh, support, right? For those of us who build WordPress products, that kind of thing, you wanna offer support. You can do something as simple as a contact us form and just reply via email, integrates really nicely with a service like HelpScout or something like that. There are also obviously plugins. One that blew me away, actually would offer live chat and all of it went through the WordPress database, which might be terrifying if you wound up getting a lot of traffic, but just these crazy things like, this is WordPress, this is meant for blogging, right? That's what people say. The fact that you can host live chat rooms just blows me away. Anyway, business is boring. What about personal uses? So talking about productivity, well, I guess that's still kind of businessy, right? Nerdy. But doing things like, if you wanna host a calendar, if you've got a family and you're trying to remember who's got soccer practice when or whatever, you could, again, integrate a calendar, use a custom post type for events to remember that your kids have, whatever it is, ballet practice or that kind of thing. Also to-do lists can be shared inside of a WordPress admin or not. There are plugins that'll do it. You could also do something as simple as, again, a custom post type and then add a checkbox. Things are done or not done. Bookmarking. So if any of you are familiar with Delicious, Delicious has kind of fallen off a bit, but something like Pinboard or Pinterest. WordPress lends itself to this really well. This was another idea that came from the Advanced WP Group that said people would set up a WordPress instance that nobody knew about, but they would then go in and just add a post for every article that they read or wanted to read. URLs to links that they didn't want to forget and all that kind of stuff and then you've got the built-in search, which isn't great, but it's something, right? And just a great way to collect this data that isn't hosted on a third party or hosted with a third party so that it doesn't go away or crash. Well, it crashes if you mess up, but then it's your own fault. Some great plugins that help with this too are, oh, AdMedia from URL. So that's kind of like a Pinterest. You can collect images. WP bookmarks. And then others should have gone in business, but basically creating a KB or a knowledge base. In my world, working with agencies, a lot of agencies want to collect sort of group knowledge. If somebody learns how to do something, you want everybody else to benefit from that. So basically setting up a knowledge base where everybody can share everything that they've learned, obviously WordPress lends itself to that. Running a diary, I actually use this. Again, there are plugins, but you can essentially set up a WordPress instance. And every entry is a blog post or whatever. Now, if you're like me, you probably don't want that public. All of my hopes and dreams and crazy internal dialogue that basically nobody in the world is ever gonna care about, but it makes me feel better. But I got a little creative and set up using, integrating with a service called Mailgun, which is generally known for sending transactional emails. They will also receive an email and then do something with it. So I wrote a little bit of custom code so that every day I get an email that says, "'What did you do today?'' And I reply to that email and that email goes to Mailgun. Mailgun sends it to my website. My website consumes it and creates a post. And that's the entry. So I never have to go sign into the website. I'm just using WordPress basically for collecting my hopes and dreams. Another neat one that I just learned about recently, another and another instance where I do not recommend rolling your own is Google Reader. If any of you used that a while ago, and then they shut, Google shut it down because they're mean and often shut down services that good normal tax-paying people are using. And so I then switched to Feedly, but this other app that let me basically aggregate RSS feeds and read all the articles in one place. But you can do this with WordPress. There's a plugin called WPRSS Aggregator. And with, I guess it takes a little bit of configuration, but basically you can suck in all of this content from all of these RSS feeds into one place and then you could sign into your private WordPress or public WordPress instance and read all this content in one place so you didn't have to go to all these blogs. I thought that was really, really cool. And then one more usage that terrifies me is if you've heard of LastPass or OnePassword, somebody on AdvancedWP, again, the Facebook group was doing this, storing all the usernames and passwords for all of their accounts and bank statements. And I said, oh, could you share that URL with me? That was a joke, by the way. You don't wanna share the URL to all of your usernames and passwords. Obviously this person had the website locked down pretty good, but yeah, just used the native functionality. And then again there is also a plugin called Locker with no E, Locker that offers this. That's pretty new, so vet it carefully. So getting more specific, coming down from productivity, let's talk about health, right? Again, we're used to now tracking data if there's a thing called the quantified self where basically you track data about yourself in hopes of changing habits or fixing medical problems and that kind of thing. Obviously there are many, many apps on your phone but that means that a third party has your data. You're also relying on them to have the features you want, that kind of thing. Why not use WordPress, right? So again, we're talking about probably a private WordPress instance unless you have no problem sharing all of your personal data with the internet and Google. I did the same thing now. Anyway, but yeah, create a custom post type, use a form builder to collect the data and make it easy on yourself. And then, so a great example might be gravity forms to collect the data and then a plugin like Gravity View to spit the data out again and do things with it. You can use something like All Export, so you can export a spreadsheet and then pull it into Excel and add it and whatever you do in Excel, draw pictures. But then there are dedicated plugins, progress tracker, habit builder, things like that. Recipes, collecting recipes, I always use this as an example for if you were gonna build a SaaS app on top of WordPress, which is a whole different talk. But basically, using recipes as an example for collecting content so that you're creating basically your own index. Tracking weight loss, things like that. I recently lost 20 pounds. I'll be honest, I didn't use WordPress, but I could have. So what I used was eating better and exercising. It's weird how that works. But again, somebody on Advanced WP got really creative with this, has a Fitbit, right, which has all the data. There's a way to get the data out of the Fitbit app, whatever, using an API. And then this is brilliant. Set up Stripe, Stripe is a payment processor. And integrated with Stripe so that whatever it was, the first of every month or whatever, basically WordPress, or the code that this person wrote, would automatically look at all the steps that Fitbit reported that they did or did not step. And then automatically sent 50 bucks or not sent 50 bucks to a savings account to basically penalize them for not reaching their goals. I thought this was absolutely amazing. And again, very creative use of WordPress. So again, talking about personal uses, if you wanna expand sort of beyond yourself, get into running groups or communities online. You've got sort of pretty well-known, pretty well-established plugins like BBPress and BuddyPress. Again, the tangled web that people interacting online lends itself more towards, let it be somebody else's problem, frankly. What was the other one? Forum, BB Forum, something. Anyway, but basically you can run online forums, online groups, people can talk to each other, that kind of thing. Another interesting example from the Facebook group was somebody talking about running their local sports group. Sure enough, SportsPress, the plugin exists. But I thought this was really interesting for basically scheduling events, people signing up for events, all that kind of stuff. Doing fundraising, you can integrate with Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, that kind of thing. There's also a great organization plugin called Give. They often sponsor WordCamps. They've got a great product. And then I thought this was kind of a cool one. Basically if you've got a lot of books or you want to do kind of a book sharing or a tool sharing sort of functionality, there's a WP inventory manager plugin that does this. But it would also be pretty straightforward to code where basically you could have every post or yeah, every post if you created a custom post type. Would be an object and then you could basically have people sign in as users and sign in, sign out, that kind of thing. Anyway, so this is basically, I've tried to just give you an array of some of the stuff that I've run into. Things that I've heard about talking about, you know, that's basically where we are today. There's so much potential for how WordPress can be used today and going forward. Like I said a minute ago, I got a new idea 20 minutes ago talking to somebody here. So I strongly encourage you to be thinking about WordPress in new and different ways. Talk to the people around you, see how they're using it and go forth and do interesting things. Thank you. Any questions? Any wild and crazy ideas? I should have planted somebody in the back been like, hey, raise your hand and mention this. Oh, sorry. So I speak really fast and I mention lots of websites. Will my slides be available? I am planning on writing all this stuff down. This is a new talk for me, so I don't have that resource online yet, but I plan to. So asking if I use a framework for when I build plugins. Not generally. For me, especially if this kind of stuff, I'm trying to solve a problem initially. So it's usually, since I am a developer, it's just a matter of opening up functions.php or something like that and just starting to bash away and see if I could make it work. And then later sticking it into plug-in form or something like that. But also a lot of this stuff for me is just, can I do it? Maybe even more than solving real problems for real clients, like I said. Some of this has been for clients, but some of it like tracking my own habits and that kind of stuff is, as per terms, my diary is personal use and I just kind of wanted to see if I could. So no, but I could. Anybody else? Thank you very much.